Learn to be grateful for armchairs, where you fit
like a nut in its shell. Consider that plum blossoms
happen twice: once in the vase, once as shadow.
And these double windows and quadruple doors --
all have been constructed to slow the passage
of air, feet, time. You come through
in the morning and by afternoon, the day is
something: a shadow's inches, a stanza, an emptied
coffee cup.

And things have their correspondences:
Cézanne's boy always walks toward you
like the future. The chairs' foreheads
gentle the clamor of unobserved cells in a room --
as the face of your beloved
answers for all of you.

Between the eye and its sighted object
a chronicle of personality takes place.
All you need to know about me
is I love the piled-on rectangles of a room,
a window admitting the hill's diagonal,
birches' white strokes on a green band.
Nearsighted eyes arrange the page
at a slant, which the heart interprets as stairs.